B’stilla and other Warkha Pastry Dishes

Was it of Persian origin, I wonder, or Byzantine, or even from Spanish Andaluz as is sometimes claimed, this highly spiced, highly flavoured mixture of the meat of pigeons mixed with creamy lemon-flavoured eggs and almonds, sparked with cinnamon and saffron, sweetened with pounded sugar and encased in a hundred onionskin-thin layers of pastry, so thin, in fact, that you can actually see through one before it is cooked as if it were made of the finest worked lace. Or did this legendary mediaeval tourte come from some magic Samarkand, brought on a warm soft wind from the desert, an intricately wrought dish from black Africa? Suffice to say that warkha pastry is made today in the major cities of Morocco by black travelling ladies from the Sudan whose skill at making the impossibly fragile pastry leaves up to 60cm/2 feet in diameter is one of the modern facts of Moroccan culinary history.